The Deepest Human Life

Sometimes it seems like you need a PhD just to open a book of
philosophy. We leave philosophical matters to the philosophers in
the same way that we leave science to scientists. Scott Samuelson
thinks this is tragic, for our lives as well as for philosophy.

In The Deepest Human Life he takes philosophy
back from the specialists and restores it to its proper place at
the centre of our humanity, rediscovering it as our most profound
effort toward understanding, as a way of life that anyone can live.
Exploring the works of some of history’s most important thinkers in
the context of the everyday struggles of his students, he guides us
through the most vexing quandaries of our existence - and shows
just how enriching the examined life can be.

Samuelson begins at the beginning: with Socrates, working his most
famous assertion—that wisdom is knowing that one knows nothing -
into a method, a way of approaching our greatest mysteries. From
there he springboards into a rich history of philosophy and the
ways its journey is encoded in our own quests for meaning. He
ruminates on Epicurus against the sonic backdrop of crickets and
restaurant goers in Iowa City. He follows the Stoics into the cell
where James Stockdale spent seven years as a prisoner of war. He
spins with al-Ghazali first in doubt, then in the ecstasy of the
divine. And he gets the philosophy education of his life when one
of his students, who authorized a risky surgery for her son that
inadvertently led to his death, asks with tears in her eyes if Kant
was right, if it really is the motive that matters and not the
consequences. Through heartbreaking stories, humanizing
biographies, accessible theory, and evocative interludes like “On
Wine and Bicycles” or “On Zombies and Superheroes ,”
he invests philosophy with the personal and vice versa. The result
is a book that is at once a primer and a reassurance—that the most
important questions endure, coming to life in each of us.